Traveling with Progeny

Sooner or later, your children become adults. Mostly. It is not unusual for these little angels to revert to 8 year old terrors even if they are fully grown successful adults when they are in your presence. If there are more than one of the adult children in the moment with parents, it is almost inevitable that reader's theater of family scripts will be presented again by all sorts of allegedly grown up people powerless to act their age after some time in the old system. Forgotten bickering will appear. Rivalries no longer relevant will raise their ugly heads. Whining will commence. Authoritarian tones will surface. Ancient teasing will successfully annoy victims. And all this is just from the parents.

Travelling with progeny usually means that you are trapped in close quarters with them for hours at a time. Inevitably in my family, veiled and generally good-natured complaints about very old injustices arise. For instance, I made my kids be completely quiet for one meal on Sundays every week. The adults would talk and there would be no children chattering, no hand signals, no sighs or facial exaggerations. The adults would have a discussion and the children would be, for just a few minutes, seen and not heard. At the time, this was not a terribly controversial discipline, but today's values are completely child oriented and give my kids new cause to roll their eyes at how they were raised. So when I travel with progeny, topics of justice, development, responsibility, and authority are always in the jury box and I am usually at the defendant's table. Once I get used to this, the trial goes much more smoothly. I sometimes plead guilty just to be able to enjoy the trip.